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A surprisingly nice movie, it's not too good but it's not that bad. At first glance it looks like a typical action movie with Matrix-like scenes but the story is actually engaging and it's not too cliché. It's more a popcorn movie, but it's a good one.
7 years 3 months ago

Taking a page or twelve from the World of Darkness RPGs Vampire the Masquerade and Werewolf the Apocalypse, Underworld throws us into the deep end of the pool, very much in medias res, in a war between vampires and werewolves. We catch up to the politics at play eventually, and the heroine Selene (Kate Beckingsale) also eventually becomes sympathetic, but the film does a poor job of telling us why we should root for either side. Though there are some quick references to artificial blood, it all feels like they're washing the blood off monsters' hands. Except it all takes too long, so the first-time viewer would be right to feel at a distance from any of the stakes. I appreciate the world-building, but perhaps it loses something in the pacing, and is entirely too interested in extended machine guns blazing (not only does this seem off-genre, but it's just about the most boring action sequence I can imagine; there's some gun fu too, and that's where the movie needed to go, not boring 80s Hollywood gunplay). Still better than the monster vs. monster movies Underworld's success spawned, like Van Helsing and I, Frankenstein, which lack even more character.
1 year 7 months ago